Who Bamboozled Whom?

The nuclear deal with Iran is a wildly lopsided agreement. Whereas Iran received permanent concessions, the United States and its partners managed only to buy a little time. The agreement will delay the advent of a nuclear-capable Iran for about a decade—and much less than that should Tehran decide to cheat. Meanwhile, thanks to the deal, Iranian influence in the Middle East is set to grow. All of these benefits accrue to Iran without its ever having given any guarantee that it will change its revolutionary, expansionist, and brutal ways.

Why did the Obama administration accept such a deal? In trying to answer this question, some critics have claimed that the president and his negotiator, Secretary of State John Kerry, were simply no match for their opponents. The Iranians, so the argument goes, are master negotiators—they play chess while the Americans play checkers. “You guys have been bamboozled and the American people are going to pay for that,” Senator Jim Risch of Idaho told Kerry during recent hearings on the nuclear deal.

One sympathizes with the senator’s frustration, but his criticism is misplaced. The Iranians are not nearly so talented as claimed. While Foreign Minister Javad Zarif did exhibit skill in the negotiations, he also resorted to blatantly underhanded tactics that, opposite a different American team, would have rebounded against him. Zarif made concessions one day, only to revoke them the next; raised new issues at the eleventh hour; and blurred the lines of authority between himself and the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to the point where Kerry never knew for certain whether a deal could actually be cut.